In Paris, the last days of autumn; a gray, troubled sky at daybreak,
the fall of twilight at noon, followed, at seven-thirty, by slanting
rains and black umbrellas as the people of the city hurried home
past the bare trees. On the third of December, 1938, in the heart of
the Seventh Arrondissement, a champagne-colored Lancia sedan turned
the corner of the rue Saint-Dominique and rolled to a stop in the
rue Augereau. Then the man in the backseat leaned forward for a
moment and the chauffeur drove a few feet further and stopped again,
this time in the shadow between two streetlamps.

The man in the back of the Lancia was called Ettore, il conte
Amandola-the nineteenth Ettore, Hector, in the Amandola line, and
count only the grandest of his titles. Closer to sixty than fifty,
he had dark, slightly bulging eyes, as though life had surprised
him, though it had never dared to do that, and a pink flush along
his cheekbones, which suggested a bottle of wine with lunch, or
excitement in the anticipation of an event planned for the evening.
In fact, it was both. For the rest of his colors, he was a very
silvery sort of man: his silver hair, gleaming with brilliantine,
was brushed back to a smooth surface, and a thin silver mustache,
trimmed daily with a scissors, traced his upper lip. Beneath a white
wool overcoat, on the lapel of a gray silk suit, he wore a ribbon
holding a silver Maltese cross on a blue enamel field, which meant
he held the rank of cavaliere in the Order of the Crown of Italy. On
the other lapel, the silver medal of the Italian Fascist party; a
tipped square with diagonal fasces-a bundle of birch rods tied,
with a red cord, to an axe. This symbolized the power of the consuls
of the Roman Empire, who had the real rods and axe carried before
them, and had the authority to beat with the birch rods, or behead
with the axe.

Count Amandola looked at his watch, then rolled down the rear window
and peered through the rain at a short street, the rue du Gros
Caillou, that intersected the rue Augereau. From this point of
observation-and he had twice made sure of it earlier that week-he
could see the entry of the Hotel Colbert; a rather subtle entry,
only the name in gold letters on the glass door, and a spill of
light from the lobby that shone on the wet pavement. A rather subtle
hotel, the Colbert, quiet, discreet, that catered to les affaires
cinq-a-sept; amours conducted between five and seven, those flexible
hours of the early evening. But, Amandola thought, a little taste of
fame for you tomorrow. The hotel commissionaire, holding a large
umbrella, left the entry and headed briskly down the street, toward
the rue Saint-Dominique. Once more, Amandola looked at his watch.
7:32, it said. No, he thought, it is 1932 hours.

For this occasion, twenty-four-hour time, military time, was
obviously the proper form. He was, after all, a major, had taken a
commission in 1915, served in the Great War, and had the medals, and
seven lavishly tailored uniforms, to prove it. Served with
distinction-officially recognized-in the purchasing office of the
Ministry of War, in Rome, where he had given orders, maintained
discipline, read and signed forms and letters, and made and answered
calls on the telephone, his military decorum scrupulous in every
way.

And so it had remained, since 1927, in his tenure as a senior
official in the Pubblica Sicurezza, the department of Public
Security of the Ministry of the Interior, set up by Mussolini’s
chief of national police a year earlier. The work was not so
different from his job during the war; the forms, the letters, the
telephone, and the maintenance of discipline-his staff sat at
attention at their desks, and formality was the rule in all
discourse.

1944 hours. Rain drummed steadily on the roof of the Lancia and
Amandola pulled his overcoat tighter, against the chill. Outside on
the sidewalk, a maid-under her open raincoat a gray-and-white
uniform-was pulled along by a dachshund wearing a sweater. As the
dog sniffed at the pavement and began to circle, the maid squinted
through the window at Amandola. Rude, the Parisians. He did not
bother to turn away, simply looked through her, she did not exist. A
few minutes later, a black square-bodied taxi pulled up to the entry
of the Colbert. The commissionaire hopped out, leaving the door
open, as a couple emerged from the lobby; he white-haired, tall and
stooped, she younger, wearing a hat with a veil. They stood together
under the commissionaire’s umbrella, she raised her veil and they
kissed passionately-until next Tuesday, my beloved. Then the woman
climbed into the taxi, the man tipped the commissionaire, raised his
own umbrella, and strode around the corner.

1950 hours. Ecco, Bottini!

The chauffeur was watching his side-view mirror. “Il galletto,” he
said. Yes, the cockerel, so they called him, for he did indeed
strut. Heading along the rue Augereau toward the Colbert, he was the
classical short man who refused to be short: posture erect, back
stiff, chin high, chest out. Bottini was a Turinese lawyer who had
emigrated to Paris in 1935, dissatisfied with the fascist policies
of his native country. A dissatisfaction no doubt sharpened by a
good public beating and a half a bottle of castor oil, administered
by a Blackshirt action squad as a crowd gathered and gawked in
silence. Always a liberal, probably a socialist, possibly a secret
Communist, Amandola suspected-slippery as eels, these
types-Bottini was a friend to the oppressed, and prominent in the
friends-to-the-oppressed community.

But the problem with il galletto wasn’t that he strutted, the
problem was that he crowed. Arriving in Paris, he had naturally
joined the Giustizia e Liberta-justice and liberty-organization,
the largest and most determined group of the antifascist opposition,
and then become editor of one of their clandestine newspapers,
Liberazione, written in Paris, smuggled into Italy, then printed and
covertly distributed. Infamita! This paper kicked like a mule;
barbed, witty, knowing, and savage, with not a wisp of respect for
Italy’s glorious fascismo or Il Duce or any of his achievements. But
now, Amandola thought, this galletto was done crowing.

As Bottini turned the corner of the rue Augereau, he took off his
steel-framed eyeglasses, wiped the rain from the lenses with a large
white handkerchief, and put the glasses in a case. Then he entered
the hotel. He was precisely on schedule, according to the
surveillance reports. On Tuesday evenings, from eight to ten, always
in Room 44, he would entertain his mistress, the wife of the French
socialist politician LaCroix. LaCroix, who had headed one ministry,
then another, in the Popular Front government. LaCroix, who stood
beside the Prime Minister, Daladier, in the newspaper photographs.
LaCroix, who dined at his club every Tuesday and played bridge until
midnight.

It was 2015 before a taxi pulled up to the Colbert and Madame
LaCroix emerged, and ran with tiny steps into the hotel. Amandola
got only a glimpse of her-brick red hair, pointy white nose, a
Rubenesque woman, fleshy and abundant. And greatly appetitious,
according to the operatives who’d rented Room 46 and eavesdropped on
the other side of the wall. Subjects are vocal, and noisy, said one
report. Describing, Amandola supposed, every sort of moan and squeal
as the two went at their coupling like excited swine. Oh, he knew
her sort; she liked her food and she liked her wine and she liked
her naked pleasures-any and all of them no doubt, the full deck of
naughty playing cards. Libertines. A full-length mirror faced the
foot of the large bed in Room 44 and surely they took advantage of
it, thrilled to watch themselves thrashing about, thrilled to
watch-everything.

Now, Amandola thought, one must wait.

They had learned it was the lovers’ custom to spend a few minutes in
conversation before they got busy. So, give them a little time.
Amandola’s OVRA operatives-OVRA was the name of the secret police,
the political police, established by Mussolini in the 1920s-were
already inside the hotel, had taken rooms that afternoon,
accompanied by prostitutes. Who might well, in time, be found by the
police and interrogated, but what could they say? He was bald, he
wore a beard, he said his name was Mario. But bald Mario and bearded
Mario would be, at that point, long gone across the border, back in
Italy. At most, the girls would get their pictures in the newspaper.

Madame LaCroix, when the OVRA men burst into the room, would no
doubt be indignant, this was, she would assume, some vile trick
perpetrated by her serpent of a husband. But she would not assume it
for long, and when the revolver appeared, with its long snout of a
silencer, it would be too late to scream. Would Bottini? Or would he
plead for his life? No, Amandola thought, he would do neither. He
would curse them, a vain galletto to the end, and take his medicine.
In the temple. Then, the silencer unscrewed, the revolver placed in
Bottini’s hand. So sad, so dreary, a doomed love affair, a lover’s
despair.

And would the world believe it? The tryst that ended in tragedy?
Most would, but some wouldn’t, and it was for them that this event
had been staged, the ones who would know immediately that this was
politics, not passion. Because this was not a quiet disappearance,
this was public, and flamboyant, so meant to serve as a warning: We
will do anything we want to do, you cannot stop us. The French would
be outraged, but then, the French were habitually outraged. Well,
let them sputter.

It was 2042 when the leader of the OVRA squad left the hotel and
crossed to Amandola’s side of the rue Augereau. Hands in pockets,
head down, he wore a rubber raincoat and a black felt hat, rain
dripping off the brim. As he passed the Lancia, he raised his head,
revealing a dark, heavy face, a southern face, and made eye contact
with Amandola. A brief glance, but sufficient. It’s done.

4 December, 1938. The Cafe Europa, in a narrow street near the Gare
du Nord, was owned by a Frenchman of Italian descent. A man of
fervent and heated opinions, an idealist, he made his back room
available to a group of Parisian giellisti, so-called for their
membership in the Giustizia e Liberta-known informally by the
initials GL, thus giellisti. There were eight of them that morning,
called to an emergency meeting. They all wore dark overcoats,
sitting around a table in the unlit room, and, except for the one
woman, they wore their hats. Because the room was cold and damp, and
also, though nobody ever said it out loud, because it was somehow in
keeping with the conspiratorial nature of their politics: the
antifascist resistance, the Resistenza.

They were all more or less in midlife, emigres from Italy, and
members of a certain class-a lawyer from Rome, a medical school
professor from Venice, an art historian from Siena, a man who had
owned a pharmacy in the same city, the woman formerly an industrial
chemist in Milan. And so on-several with eyeglasses, most of them
smoking cigarettes, except for the Sienese professor of art history,
lately employed as a meter reader for the gas company, who smoked a
powerful little cigar.

Three of them had brought along a certain morning newspaper, the
very vilest and most outrageous of the Parisian tabloids, and a copy
lay on the table, folded open to a grainy photograph beneath the
headline MURDER/SUICIDE AT LOVERS HOTEL. Bottini, bare-chested, sat
propped against a headboard, a sheet pulled up to his waist, eyes
open and unseeing, blood on his face. By his side, a shape beneath
the sheet, its arms flung wide.

The leader of the group, Arturo Salamone, let the newspaper lie open
for a time, a silent eulogy. Then, with a sigh, he flipped it
closed, folded it in half, and put it by the side of his chair.
Salamone was a great bear of a man, with heavy jowls, and thick
eyebrows that met at the bridge of his nose. He had been a shipping
agent in Genoa, now worked as a bookkeeper at an insurance company.
“So then,” he said. “Do we accept this?”

“I do not,” said the lawyer. “Staged.”

“Do we agree?”

The pharmacist cleared his throat and said, “Are we completely sure?
That this was, assassination?”

“I am,” Salamone said. “Bottini had no such brutality in him. They
killed him, and his lover-the OVRA, or someone like them. This was
ordered by Rome; it was planned, prepared, and executed. And not
only did they murder Bottini, they defamed him: ‘this is the sort of
man, unstable, vicious, who speaks against our noble fascism.’ And,
of course, there are people who will believe it.”

“Some will, always, anything,” the woman chemist said. “But we shall
see what the Italian papers say about it.”

“They will have to follow the government line,” the Venetian
professor said.

The woman shrugged. “As usual. Still, we have a few friends there,
and a simple word or two, alleged or supposedly, can cast a shadow.
Nobody just reads the news these days, they decipher it, like a
code.”

“Then how do we counter?” the lawyer said. “Not an eye for an eye.”

“No,” Salamone said. “We are not them. Not yet.”

“We must expose it,” the woman said. “The true story, in
Liberazione. And hope the clandestine press, here and in Italy, will
follow us. We can’t let these people get away with what they’ve
done, we can’t let them think they got away with it. And we should
say where this monstrosity came from.”

“Where is that?” the lawyer said.

She pointed upward. “The top.”

The lawyer nodded. “Yes, you’re right. Perhaps it could be done as
an obituary, in a box outlined in black, a political obituary. It
should be strong, very strong-here is a man, a hero, who died for
what he believed in, a man who told truths the government could not
bear to have revealed.”

“Will you write it?” Salamone said.

“I will do a draft,” the lawyer said. “Then we’ll see.”

The professor from Siena said, “Maybe you could end by writing that
when Mussolini and his friends are swept away, we will pull down his
fucking statue on a horse and raise one to honor Bottini.”

The lawyer took pen and pad from his pocket and made a note.

“What about the family?” the pharmacist said. “Bottini’s family.”

“I will talk to his wife,” Salamone said. “And we have a fund, we
must help as best we can.”